It is too often the case in many of the manuscripts I see, the author is in such a rush to tell his story the entire narrative devolves to exposition. In other words, the author is telling rather than showing. Why avoid exposition? The answer to that is quite simple. When you’re telling your reader instead of showing, you remove the reader from the story. You’re intruding. That suspension of disbelief shatters because all action…
Connie Penner, author of the debut novel, A Town Called Forget, took some time to talk to us about the novel and her process. Q: Whatever inspired you to come up with the title A Town Called Forget? CP: There is a little French town, not far from where I was born, the spelling is the same but the French pronunciation is different. I thought it was a delightful name for a story. Although the landscape…
Michael R. Fletcher, author of Beyond Redemption, and 88, recently reviewed D. G. Valdron’s forthcoming debut novel, The Mermaid’s Tale. “He said the Arukh only had one word. It was their word for rage and for pain, for fighting and dying. It was a word spoken in sorrow and anger. It was the word they said to a world that didn’t want them, that had no place for them. It was loneliness and defiance and in the end it was…
November 1, 2016, a revised and updated version of Leslie Gadallah’s Cat’s Pawn will be released by Five Rivers in both print and digital. We asked cover artist, james Beveridge, to discuss his creative process for the cover for this, the first of the Empire of Kaz trilogy. Hmmm…where to start? First, let me give a little space to my background and history illustrating SF&F. I’ve been an avid consumer of all things fantastic since I was young. One of…
My colleague, Robert Runté, and I read and edit a lot of manuscripts in the course of a year. We often see the same mistakes cropping up. I thought it might be of interest to share my observations through a series of articles. At the top of my list of writing faux pas is lack of research. In any written work, the richness of the story is partly due to the depth of research, and…